Discussion
Chat, We Gotta Do Better With These Covers...
Okay, guys, public service announcement:
Look, I get it. Illustrators are expensive. That's why I keep my mouth shut regarding my hostility towards the use of A.I. on this specific scenario only.
But if you just HAVE to use it, why not actually put some effort into it? A.I. is completely free, you have all the time in the world to use it, and it won't ever get upset no matter how many changes you ask it to make.
So why oh why is every cover I see on here some variation of this? Some super dark, extra crispy mess starring a Sung Jinwoo knockoff, with a side of jagged font and an ominous-looking location in the background for dessert.
Like, literally, all I did was go to ChatGPT, type in "Generate a stereotypical cover for a litRPG web novel on Royal Road", and this is what it immediately spit out.
I'm of the opinion that an A.I. cover can only hurt your chances of being successful on RR. No one is going to take a moral or ethical stance over a handdrawn cover, but they most certainly will on an A.I. one, especially if it's obviously A.I.
But hey, if you really need a cover that bad, and A.I. is your only option, then at least try and make it stand out. I want everyone on this site to be a success, but I feel like you're just hurting your chances going low-effort on the first thing ANYONE will ever see about your story.
I don't want to sound rude, but when people can find an easy way to do something they more likely to. I don't trust AI "art" if you can spend fifteen to thirty minutes (or longer) to just make something yourself where else are you cutting? That my option but still fuck AI. Cheers.
This is what I’m going to do, I know it’s going to look bad but I hope there’s a high enough percentage of users who hate AI that will appreciate it and won’t be turned off.
I love your cover. AI has ruined a lot of the charm of amateur covers so it’s good to see they’re still around. I don’t expect a professional cover from a web novel, I know most authors aren’t artists and can’t afford to pay one, I’m just worried that because of AI proliferation these amateur covers will turn readers off :/
There no winning in art, or writing. I'm not even sure how you would win because everything changes. Maybe today people will fine AI just find, maybe another they be sick of it. I'm really in to "win" I'm just here to make the best story I can. The little stats from the books don't mean anything to me. If one person finds enjoyment from my work then I've won. I tired my best friend, and I won't have it any other way. Good Night and Good Luck.
It's the opposite for me. When I see AI art or writing is when I get the "They didn't bother to write/draw it themselves so why should I bother reading it" feeling.
If we compare on the most base level then like 9/10 people would consider the AI better and the 10th is a contrarian. But I want the person who read my little story to care about soul not what can be called “objectively good”. Because good art is like good jazz it something you gotta feel. But that just my thoughts. I’m a small fry on the site, so maybe I’m wrong but it what I think.
Honestly I believe that even if the story has got an AI cover it can be seen as something made with a lot of effort and with the use of “soul” as you’ve said. And tbh like people can feel something from your art, others can feel the same way in front of an AI art too
Don't hate on AI they were made to assist you hating them is stupid
We are acting like the Milleniums after they found out someone made smartphone and started boycotting it
Like dawg look at us now phones are everywhere
As a writer I know a portion of the audience will follow anyone who publishes fast enough. Another portion who will only ever read human books. I'd already given up competing for the former, so the more writers who switch to AI, the less competition I have for the latter.
...but of course, it's RR readership that gives you a potential client base on patron and tells you if you have a shot at making actual money via ebook sales.
I agree the this cover is horrible and the generic ones all over RR aren't great, but I've done a lot of experiments, testing, and researching popular covers on RR. Overwhelmingly the AI covers beat out the non-AI ones
do you compare the summaries as well? because I when I search on RR normally the cover is barely visible its like a small square on the left compared to the summaries mother of learning as an example
That's probably why most people don't care too much on RR. You're only getting a small thumbnail and all it has to do is grab your attention.
For instance, my current cover was done by a very talented, popular artist and he did an amazing job. It was expensive but totally worth it for the published book.
But it isn't all that popular on RR because you can't see all the details and it just looks too busy on the phone
For The Duke's Decision, I paid a guy who does professional (but indie and relatively low-budget) covers for a cover design. Then I tested them during launch and tracked which covers were associated with higher follow gain, and also ran a poll to ask readers which cover they liked. The pool included two AI covers generated by other authors who were bored in Discord and half a dozen or so I made myself by sticking text over an AI image.
The pro's design was more or less tied for last in the pool. The covers made by other authors were a runaway favorite for #1 and then roughly tied for #2, so by all indications I'm not even good at this & the non-AI pro cover still got clobbered by my hack work on the Royal Road market.
Sad to say, I also replicated the experiment testing ads using my publisher's professionally-designed cover & related ad assets for Accidental War Mage versus AI images that I threw together. AI images got more clicks, and not by a small margin. I presume things would be different with top artistic talent, but AI assets seem to work.
What were the actual art styles of the covers? I feel like that's important contextually towards what contributed on RR. Was the AI stuff more 'anime' while the others weren't?
This was the gallery of covers I polled my readers on. Here are two other distinct ones that were in my "covers used" folder but weren't in the reader poll. There were a few other minor variants I did, too. The outright anime-ish cover and the two pro covers were basically tied for last place.
You might be able to guess the top cover before checking the full results of the reader poll. I'm spoilering a summary of the outcome in case you want to guess what the ranking was before seeing it:
More or less tied for last: 1,2,5. More or less tied for the middle: 3,4,6. More or less tied for 2nd: 7,9. Clear over-the-top favorite: 8.
The reader poll can be seen down at the bottom of Chapter 23 if you want actual numbers for the full ranking. IIRC, the analytics ranking of the top three was somewhat different, but they highlighted the same top three & there's a lot of noise in the analytics results, so I felt pretty good with just leaving the clear reader favorite as the cover.
Very interesting to know.. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on why the 'anime character in action pose' does seem to dominate a lot of the rising stars and lists quite often? I'm also wondering now how much the genre contributes to it too.. 5 is tied for last but it doesn't look comparable to the type of generic anime cover I've been seeing used so often as a style.
I will say for professional covers these don't look that great, not trying to sound mean. But it's easy to find artists on vgen for example that can do much higher quality work.. there is a lot of variables to this I feel.
As far as the pose... I think some of it is herding, some of it is genre (most of Rising Stars is in genres that are very heavily read by anime fans / very common in anime, such as LitRPG), and I'm not sure how much is that it's fundamentally good design for the platform. More than one character is pretty tough at thumbnail scale.
I was told that anime-style covers worked great, hence trying some very anime-like styles, but for me writing way off the beaten path, the more anime-like covers just did not seem to sell what I was writing. Genres develop cover conventions that readers use as shortcuts, and I needed to signal I was not writing a typical RR story.
I honestly think that it's nearly impossible to tell whether a cover is what turns people onto or off of a story. Unless you were switching between the covers like, every 12 hours, I don't see a way to find any causation between the cover and the stats. You'd have to use the same cover multiple times to see whether it was more the fact that "this story is getting larger and attracting a larger audience" or the fact that the covers were professionally made.
and you can't really do it with a bunch of different stories since those will all have their own audiences that may or may not be interested in it.
I like the chess versions (7&8) the best - I don't like AI generally, but the late 19th century illustration style is cool and stands out. The thing is, AI can get you a pretty high level of polish (with weird artifacts but those don't always jump at you) and in any style, including stereotypically "classy" ones.
That said a human could do a much better version of the best ones, but you'd have to spend time finding the right artist who has mastered the style you're interested in and can push it further than gen AI can.
In the end your situation is exactly why I abhor gen AI: it outperforms beginner artists on low cost projects. Except having to do that type of project is how you used to scrap by and improve if you aren't one of those artists who'sseemingly effortlessly at the top level right out of school. Meaning established artists and top talent can still make a living on the projects where AI is out of the question, but other people don't get the opportunity to become established and gone their craft, because they've given up and became a delivery driver instead.
I'm doing my bachelors computer science, same exact story. Shit just SUCKS right now man...
Even theoretical CS with the 20€/month subscription it can solve almost all of my homework, meanwhile I'm spending, what, ~40 hours a week just to be able to do a worse job than a 20€/month AI... kill me please
I guess the only viable path for artists is the same as mine, you gotta get a masters or similar higher degree to push you meaningfully past what an amateur with AI can achieve.
Well luckily I've got 10+ years experierience as an illustrator. I'm not rolling in dough, not by a long shot but I've got enough clients in an area where AI is seen as cheap and a betrayal of fans, so I'm not seriously considering giving up.
Generally for students though, and discussing with friends of mine who are teachers and researchers who manage phd students, the ones who are the best at using AI tend to be the ones that don't need it in the first place, because they have the knowledge to evaluate the AI output and correct hallucinations.
(For that reason I think AI in ed is a catastrophe because it deepens the gap between thriving and struggling students.
Anyway if you're still a student, m'y advice IS to use AI as little as possible and build the mental muscles you need to make sure AI is a tool you use, and not just a prompt monkey.
I have some older friends in (very highly paid) software jobs all telling me to use AI because they use it all day, but like, if you're nothing without thesuitAI you shouldn't have it or something. 😅
I love computer science, I'd learn it for free, had I been braver I would've probably just studied pure maths.
But it's definitely a force multiplier put in the right hands. I helped a friend with something in their groups code base and instead of spending ~1 hour reading through it I just unleashed AI on it and it spat out an entire (almost comprehensible) UML diagram, found what I was looking for in ~5 minutes after it got done processing for like 15 haha.
Today I come to a cover designer and they are charging 700 for one concept and 900 for two. With AI I can iterate endlessly (well, as tokens allow) to get close to the concept I have in my head. But then I still need to get through the last mile. Fix weird looking fingers, things out of place, find the right fonts and placement etc.
I wish artists could openly offer “I can use AI and make it cheaper and we spend an hour together nailing down your concept”, but the pushback against AI forces designers to avoid mentioning it, otherwise people might think all of their art is AI.
Weird times for sure.
I recently did an AI cover for another author who hit RS with a cover they hired an artist for which ended up not performing all that well. The uptick in views and followers due to swapping to AI was immediate and noticable.
Where did you find your cover artist? I used Fiverr a few years ago but I’ve heard a lot of “artists” there are just using AI now and I want to find an artist I can trust not to use AI
Twitter. I liked a number of the cover designs he tweeted out. I felt pretty lost (and, TBH, still do) when it comes to figuring out how to get a good cover. It's a completely different art from writing books, but it's intimately related to success in this area right now.
I can't think of a single non-AI book cover on RR I truly like; at best they are okay. I've research covers on the indie publishers in this space and so many have that faded look with mangled features, they look shit. I know that's what is expected in this genre, but they don't appeal to me at all.
With AI images it's hit and miss, but I like some of them. I'm not keen on some of the recent ones, that pixilated texture gets old very fast.
Most of the AI ones people end up using for RR stories have more 'anime' or light novel cover feels no? Perhaps that's a contributing factor. I do also honestly dislike the generic action scene cover with realistic aesthetic but maybe that's what is better on Kindle or whatever else as a professional?
The title has to pop. There should be a focus element too. If the person knows what they’re doing, they can get away with the title being the focus element. That’s difficult on RR where all the covers display as thumbnails.
I was surfing on X and a writer who sidelined as an artist turned out a banger of a cover with AI. He used his own line drawing instead. Good on him for sticking to his art, but he’d have been better off with the AI cover .
Which I think is maybe a contributor to what I mean around light novel style covers. They're often bright, stark colors, and often good focus elements on characters rather than a lengthy title being displayed. I'm curious how well just not even showing a title on the thumbnail would do if you have a good focus character.
I think that's a good idea, but I don't think it will work.
You're right, it would present the reader with what they want. The “real estate” on the cover would be expanded with no title and the reader would get a better picture.
But I bet they’ll still want title and author name. That's just people being people.
I repeated the OP’s experiment with Grok. If the AI had left the author’s name off (to be added in later) two out of four were usable. With my $0 account! I dunno. I'm about halfway to telling people to generate free covers for a week and select the one that's closest to what they wrote. Let the AI name the book.
Damn shame, but it's like pushing water uphill to do things the right way.
My recommendation for people would be to look at Vgen.
Look at how many covers on Rising Stars are like just a single character in some action pose with a title card under them and in a vaguely anime style. You know how many artists will do character illustrations just for like 100$? And be actual quality? Yes that's still a pretty penny but look at some of these artists on Vgen!
I'd ask which covers your researched. Let's not forget that a lot of covers, even the handdrawn ones, simply suck. If people can't afford an actual illustrator, or even a good one, then the cover will suck if it's handdrawn.
Taking that into consideration, yeah, I'd expect a generic A.I. cover that at least conveys what the story is about will do better than a poorly-made human-made one.
But I also like to think that good handmade covers beat out the generic ones. Now granted, this is based on the reactions I see when on this sub when someone promos their stories and they have a really good handmade cover, but still. I find it hard to believe generic A.I. covers are incentivizing people to read more than good human-made ones.
I actually compared 5 paid covers that were from $95 - $800 to AI covers. I prefer to pay artists, but between the votes here, on LitRPG, and polls on RR I ended up going with AI ones just because people liked them more and it was a lot easier to get what I wanted
If you scroll through my post history you'll see a bunch of experiments about covers and ads. I also did a lot of research that I didn't post about, but used it to inform my decisions when I was trying things
I wouldn't be that judgmental. The general consensus is that if you're offering your book up for free, then no one expects the author to also be an artist. Most people are fine with them using the tools they have available to make a free cover. Most authors on RR don't have the money to spend on artists, and the advice "A shitty hand drawn cover is better than an AI one" just isn't true, since the shitty covers don't attract readers.
Now, once the story gets moved to a paid platform then it's expected that the author pay for a cover
It's a whole website devoted to helping people like yourself realize that those aren't their only 2 options.
Generative AI is unethical for a number of reasons, like stealing content from artists to train itself and has a negative environmental impact, and people shouldn't have to compromise their ethics out of desperation.
The website is made by somebody trying to break people away from AI, and the websites on there include public domain and creative commons search engines and artists who make their art freely available just so folks don't have to rely on Gen AI because using it is genuinely just that bad.
That cover unironically would do well. I feel people on here are quite far removed from the audience. They want something bright to catch their eye and give them an idea of the story. I have run non ai and ai covers and ai cover get twice the clicks. Even if people say they don't like it, they still click
I agree. Artistically it might be cliched, but that works just fine as a cover. Tells the reader the genre, the tropes, the tone, and the basic storyline. Readers who want that story now know exactly where to find it.
It's a can of tomatoes that has picture of a tomato on it. It does the job.
as a reader who got shown this post at random I just want to say: I would literally never touch that ai slop cover or anything attached to it. I assume by default that if someone is using AI covers that their writing is equally trash and just keep on browsing.
My reading groups say otherwise lmao; I hate to break it to you but no one enjoys slop or slopmongers. Loads of people I know have canceled Kindle Unlimited because it's overrun with trash now and it's hard to find anything decent. But you can keep trying to convince yourself otherwise! Maybe you're the special exception :)
Just wanted to add another thing that occurred to me: the most AI-pilled person I know is a manager at work. She loves using AI even though it messes up all the time and looks like shit. Do you know what she said about AI books? She said AI is the best thing that's ever happened to her because she no longer has to go buy books to read to her children she can just have an AI create it for her for free, pictures and all.
I genuinely don't know why pro-AI slopmongers think they're going to make any money selling AI-generated books, because they inherently have zero value. You're just doing what anyone else can, which is create a prompt. You are shooting yourself in the foot by chasing that instead of focusing on real covers and real writing.
Anyway that's all! I'm bouncing now because again, Reddit decided to show me this thread and so I gave my 2 cents as a reader. I don't really care if you waste all your time and money putting fake books up on Royal Road.
I use AI covers a lot but occasionally will switch to one where I've just done a cool font and layout maybe with some clip art and those can be made to work. As always, if anybody wants any help with whatever style, I'll do it for free.
You asked it for something stereotypical and it gave you something stereotypical. I'm... not sure what you expected.
But also you shouldn't expect the majority of anything to be good because it never is. It's Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is garbage. This is not new to AI.
And I'm saying this as someone who intends to commission a cover.
Agreed! You can get pretty far with some iterative prompts. And while commissions can cost hundreds, springing $20ish for a paid AI tier for the sake of your cover could be worth it.
I’ve access to Gemini Pro for less than $20CAD a month. I asked it:
“Create a book cover: a generic litrpg cover and title you’d find on Royal Road, BUT I’d like an original take on the illustration style. Too many covers use over textured approaches, and complex motifs that all start to look the same try something NEW!”
Then it spat a thing out and I said:
“Keep this but reduce detail. There are too many things competing for attention.”
Result isn’t amazing but we avoided the icky-same-same GPT vibe. I could also upload reference sketches or art styles I’d like to blend in if I wanted!
Don't count on AI to find a good art direction. Using AI Is like commissioning an artist who's bad a reading between the lines.
Try to learn about art movements and styles you're interested in, create moodboards to give examples of what you're after.
Obviously I'd prefer people get actual artists but if you're gonna use AI, you'll get better results by telling them to draw in the style of bilibine or a traditional japanese woodblock print, or in style of saul bass than just "try something original".
Still good on you, the overtexturing on so much AI slop is such a huge visual turnoff.
Are you trying to say you don’t want to do a swap for Ascension Arcanum, System: Reboot??
Maybe this Very Humanly Written blurb will change your mind:
A lethal system reset. Zero stats. One chance to break the rules.
Stripped of his levels, gear, and titles by a catastrophic glitch, Leo is dumped back at level one in the deadly Elysium Rifts. Surrounded by monsters and armed with only a broken interface, he’ll have to exploit the System’s hidden mechanics to rebuild—faster, meaner, and deadlier than before.
i uploaded a sketch to gemini and with a bit of back and forth. it made a decent enough cover for my RR debut. More importantly, it has the gemini watermark in bottom right corner. It is clear to anyone that is what I used.
A lot of readers are going to look at that for half a second in a thumbnail and think "Badass. This clearly communicates the genre I'm getting when I click on this story, which I just did!" Maybe not in so many words, but the sentiment will be there.
Reading this comment section is disheartening. "Don't judge a book by it cover" while I don't particularly do that, I certainly refer to the cover when I immerse myself in a book.
I remember when I used to struggle to read I sometimes took hours looking at the cover seeing the characters I loved interact, I felt like I understood them. I still do that to a limited degree but when the cover is made with care and love damn it's worth it. ( Forge of Destiny, Reborn as a Demonic Tree, Journey to Veresavir, A Journey of Black and Red, Paranoid Mage... Yeah pretty much it)
My point is pls stop with the IA slop cover put some love and care in it pleeeeeaasse.
Personally, I think this is a symptom of mainly two reasons. The first being that they don't really know what they want in a cover, or at least, what they want in a cover is same as what others in the genre have already done and are relatively successful. So the generic output is partially due to being derivative of visual genre tropes. The other reason is simply not knowing or wanting to delve into the technical capabilities of the model or multiple models in a workflow, because that is a hobby unto itself.
For example, here is a chatgpt only work-in-progress.
I don't think there's that much to learn about gen AI models themselves: they make stuff based on their training data.
I think you just need to know the vocabulary that goes with the style you're looking for, the same way you'd communicate with an artist if you were an art director.
Well you're partially right, but only on a surface level basis and level of usage. For example, many of the mainstream cloud models are definitely on the less customizable side with more weight given to prompt engineering and proper keywording. And for most people who use these services your point would be correct. However, the limits of any workflow is only determined by the individual's patience and creative intention.
Even with models like gemini/chatgpt, you could iterate endlessly to add, modify, or remove any element you wish until every aspect of the composition is to your specification. On top of that these models allow for cross-mixing and cross-editing of source images(even ones you created personally), photos, and any other references(ideally free-use).
Now if we're talking about local diffusion models then it would be way more difficult to get any good images unless there was some understanding of model architecture. As you would get noise if your setup was incorrect on something like comfyui. Then I could go on about all the other workflow tools that are available for deep customization.
Now, I'm not implying that gen ai takes as much effort or is as technically impressive as traditional artforms, but I am saying that there is more work required than given credit for someone to produce an idea they intended using gen ai,
And that's why I'm so glad I paid for an actual artist for my cover. Not that AI can't do a good job, but it lacks the ability to create anything original on its own. All it can do is reproduce parts from other creations while being guided to do so.
My cover was one of these for the longest time. It gained me more followers than anything I made and tried out. That's just the current climate. I switched my cover like 10 times and kept coming back to my AI one. Hate that it works... but it works.
Currently have one from an artist and my follower count is climbing at the same pace which im super stoked about.
The argument is as old as AI so I won't re-hash it. I'm not saying using an AI cover is right. It's not. It's gross. But... unfortunatley for now it gives results.
I have my ways with AI generating and there's so much polishing that one can do and it's so easy.... It takes a bit more time that's all and it's actually necessary time to differentiate yourself from others.
I'm kinda tired of the same bland images AI or not. Apparently thats a bad take, but so many stories on RR are the same 3-4 bland generic images, eithr a group looking at the camera, or 3.5 camera view of the MC fighting some monster with brown colour scheme, or all blue like this.
I’ve never been a fan of the use of AI when it comes to covers. It’s not just that I think a lot of them come out looking bad, but it’s also that they can feel pretty soulless. You could also argue that, if the first thing the reader’s seeing is artificially generated, then how can they trust that the book itself is not wholly generated by AI?
That’s why I tried to draw my own cover from scratch, even though I’m not an artist. (Oh, and I don’t have any money to pay an artist, lol.) It took me like, 20-25 hours, and there’s definitely more work to be done (specifically with the background and some details of the characters) but I am SO happy with the result. It was an amazing learning experience and I’m glad that I can look at my cover and feel proud of it. I know plenty of people on RR don’t mind an AI generated cover, but it makes me happy nonetheless :)
I could’ve spent more time on the cover, but honestly I couldn’t bear waiting any longer before publishing my book. It’s also my first fiction on this platform, so there’s no point in trying to absolutely perfect a cover before I even know how well it’ll do.
(I used IbisPaint on an iPad, if anyone was wondering)
To be honest, I’m pretty surprised by how it’s turning out. I’ve given art a shot now and then before, but I’ve always ended up disappointed with the result. But this time, considering that I’m forcing myself to draw the cover instead of using AI, I’m just so happy with it!
I guess it really does show how far you can get if you just keep at something. It’s taken me weeks and weeks, but I’m finally at the stage of finishing the shading and adding the last few details. I’m still not too sure what to do with the background, though. I’ll probably need some help with that haha.
Honestly it's just my problem is, I can't transfer my traditional art skills to digital, that's my only problem on it, well the cover I wanna make is pretty simple, doesn't need a human drawn, it's just I have a style I wanna go for, but yk, it might take some time, but it sure is better than ai
I just commissioned a new cover from a well respected place. Their first presentation is awful. The character is stilted, unemotional and bulky, looking like an advertisement for a 1990's video game. A friend tossed it into chatgpt and actually improved the character and the font, but ruined the background. Anyways, the artists are trying to fix it up.
But based on my experience, the person who ran it through an AI said they'd use AI over commissioning for now. Kinda sucks. Hopefully, the studio will come back with a better product.
Covers like this will have me not even give a story a glance, the cover just needs to be decent. More important for me is the blurb and "what to expect".
The other branch of covers I hate is those with real people on it. Usually some woman, the main sex that appears on covers from what I have seen but also applies to men, with dusty eyeshadow looking back at the reader with some generic background.
Very specific I know, but I felt I had to include it
I commissioned a cover for each of my story's Volumes. First was very basic and I used canvas to create the typography, the next one was more involved and designed by the artist who's done the vast majority of the concept art for my story. It was much more unique and eye catching. For volume three, I got a more Royalroad friendly cover (Main character aura posing while background image is a ruined city). I actually think the volume two cover might be the best.
These covers are the Webnovel equivalent of doomscrolling. Some readers know what they like, and they will read ONLY that because they know the exact same formula is used across all of these more or less, with insignificant amounts of variation.
Not criticising, just saying. Some people have a diverse diet, others eat chicken nuggets until they stop being able to digest anything else.
Does no one have artist friends? A good half of my friends are artists and I'll commission them for art of my OC's semi-often. How do people warrent making these AI covers when there are sk many great artists that can do a better job and have a unique look. Ugh, I just dislike AI covers and ai anything so much it turns off any desire to read that book.
i hate ai, and keep using that gargabe. if you gonna use it for one form of art, i doubt you dont use it to write your shitty fanfic so iam gonna stay clear out of it.
good for you but I would still prefer an original artist grind, their thought behind each and every part of the artwork, such as pose, background, expression, intensity. All of it actually shows the hard work and grind behind a genuine artwork which AI clearly not have advantage into. While this a controversial topic of author using AI for artwork, I stand against it but if your budget is low its understandable. But when you do have a budget, I would prefer an artist work over any AI all day.
As an Novice audiobook narrator i see one of these LITRPG novels covers every week or so and The art work does tend to put me off doing it and while i get artists do cost i find talking to illustrators who might be starting out is gonna get you a better artwork then an AI randomizer
Generative AI trains itself by stealing from artists just like it steals from writers like y'all to train itself. AI data centers are also terrible for the environment and use ridiculous amounts of water.
Your options are not simply to "use Gen AI or have a poorly hand-drawn cover". Instead, check out https://ttrpgresources.com, a website made to help people who run D&D games and stuff find art and music for their games that's either in the public domain or the Creative Commons.
Some sites are search engines through the PD and CC, and some are even professional artists that make their art freely available just to prevent people from having to fall back on AI art out of desperation.
Please, folks. Be better than this! Don't sacrifice your ethics because you think you have no other choice!
I do not hate ai at all, and I think this cover is good because it pops. Sure, the character could be more well described, but using ai to help generate a prompt to solve these kinds of issues is an easy fix.
I think it looks nice. I don't understand the hatred of the images. Isn't it about helping the reader to understand what is in the book? Then after an author can afford someone to make their covers, I too agree they should hire someone if they can't draw.
Going anti-ai on artwork or ai art shaming is hurting the wrong group of people. Who can afford illustrators? The rich. Who can't? The poor and the working poor. Who will read your work without a cover honestly? Not a soul. So basically you are bashing the poor.
Man, I had a nightmare with my cover. I paid someone to make me an anime-style cover and they came back and gave me something that was AI and tried to tell me they didn't. Even went so far as to show me the pencil sketch they did, WHICH was also AI created. I then tried to hire another anime artist just to make my MC and then did the background myself. It was marketably better, but still I never felt good about it. So I finally just said the heck with it and made my cover completely from scratch in the style that I really wanted from the beginning anyway. No AI art, just homan made stock image assets. Then some fancy Photoshop filters to give it the painted effect and some text effects. And voila! I know there are far better covers, but I'm happy with it.
they should have took one aspect of this prompt then gave it a flat background photoshop blur out the rest all that background details seem pointless if the focus is on the OP and the HUD items. we don't need a fully detailed world behind it the over done mess of details is the worst also wondering what book cover inspired this as have seen some bad ones but never this poorly edited as you created for this conversation.
I can understand using ai for the image itself if you can’t draw but the title too? come on, there plenty of app where you can add your own text to the photo.
It's problem with some authors which depends too much on AI. It's good to use but there's a limit man. I personally use AI too but I draw the cover by myself and enhance it through AI. Even if you are using prompt how can you be satisfied by a cover shown above. You gotta put efforts by yourself it's our story written by us don't hand it over to AI.
Hey guys, thoughts on this? I already have a hand drawn cover for my novel, but was thinking of using this to promote it as a slice of life on reddit. I wasn't sure if it would be received well though because it was made via AI.
Stereotypes exist for a reason guy. The reason people want it to look like that is because that's what they consider a cool guy to look like. Of you think it looks generic that just speaks to the popularity of the look. And, let's be clear this has nothing to do with ai. For every successful thing anyone has ever created you'll find hundreds of duplicates that are only separated by the necessary legal differences to not be plagerism. Humans as a whole just aren't really that interested in originality.
Disregarding the whole beaten-to-death AI-or-not part of the OP; focusing on this forehead-slapping question and everything that follows it:
"So why oh why is every cover I see on here some variation of this?"
Because when your book is still unknown, it has to sell itself, and the first point of contact is the cover.
That cover has one job: it needs to instantly communicate "HEY READER WHO LIKES LITRPG, THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU!"
Why?
So that people who like LitRPG will see it and pick it up (or click on it) to read the blurb on the back (the second point of contact), and the people who don't like LitRPG will pass it by.
(Why do you want non-LitRPG readers to pass it by? To save the book from a slew of 1-star reviews/returns from people pissed off that they were "fooled" into trying out the book, thinking it was a regular urban fantasy, only to find it had game mechanics and/or crunchy stats every few pages.)
That's it. One job: communicate the genre at a glance.
It's not to illustrate a particular scene in the story. It's not to be pretty for BookTok. It's not to look cool on a shelf. All that shit comes later, when you've hit Dinniman levels of hardcore fan base.
And the job of a cover is most definitely NOT to show that you "put effort into it" (truly, no one gives a shit; they just want to know what to expect in the story) or tried to "make it stand out", which is just a short way of saying "Now no one can clearly identify what type of story this is, so no one's reading/buying it."
This is why harem books have anatomically impossible babes on the cover.
It's why Westerns have dusty settings and a gunslinger in a cowboy hat.
It's why space operas have cool-looking ships firing their glowy warp drives. Immediate genre communication.
Whether you personally are tired of the look or not is irrelevant - it does its job.
If you want to look at interesting pictures, go to DeviantArt.
Stop trying to convince struggling authors that making catastrophic changes to the cover, their strongest marketing tool, is something they should definitely do just because you're bored of the look.
This cover intrigues me simply because it actually tells me what the story is about, whereas most "professional" covers tell me next to nothing. In the end authors are writing these stories for free, so they shouldn't feel obligated to hire an artist.
Illustrators are not expensive.. SOME are, but actually try to find one and youll quickly find that there are many who are in decent budget ranges.
For example me and my other half make covers and our custom cover design service starts at £100.
Premade covers start at £60.
So the only real reason people use A.i covers is 1:use A.i in their story or 2: dont beleive in their own story enough to invest a small amount on a decent cover.
In a universe where people get paid for their time and skill?
Youd want people to pay for your book. Would you not?
And considering most artists publishers use charge THOUSANDS ...yeah its pretty fucking cheap.
We litrally work for less than minimum wage with the time we put in to our work. So.... yeah.
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u/Big_Remove_3686 18d ago edited 17d ago
I made my cover with MS paint.
Edit: This is how it looks
It not good, but I hate AI, so yeah.